Blog Love Omega Glee: That Tree Could Use Some Eyeshadow (27 April 2012)

Still getting the rhythm of his new schedule down, and overestimating the time it takes to commute from Lackwood, a suburb of Cleaveland, to the Ostomy Cosmetics corporate compound located in a suburb even further west that used to be farmland and forest not that long ago, Jake arrives at work early, pulling into the parking lot of Ostomy Cosmetics a full half-hour before he really needs to be there. He parks his car amid the first-shifters all starting theirs up, pulling out, and going home, which flutters briefly across his consciousness as a metaphor for his life of late, always out of sync with the rest of the world, a twenty-five-year-old college graduate working the same job a high school dropout could. He thinks briefly of going somewhere else until it's time to work, but it's exurbia so there isn't much else to go to, just lots of cheap land, low taxes, and racial homogeneity, so he gets out, squints in the afternoon sun, and does the second shift shuffle into the factory, accepting his fate of essentially spending the rest of his waking hours today working, something that's been hanging over his head all day since he woke up this morning.

While going to hang up his jacket, he runs into Lucy, a fellow second shifter, who says, "Oh, are you here early for the Arbor Day ceremony too?"

"Uh, sure," Jake says, noting Lucy's pretty brown eyes and cute button nose.

"You're the new guy, right?"

"Uh, yeah, I started Tuesday."

"You're catching on quick. Every once in a while, the company will have one of these silly things and pay us to attend. Not everyone takes advantage of it, but I always do. You just listen to a boring speech and eat some cookies and you get paid for it. It beats cranking out mascara on the lines. Go punch in and we'll go over."

"I can punch in already?"

"Of course, do you think I'd show up early if I weren't getting paid?"

Shrugging, Jake takes his little white Ostomy Cosmetics plastic card and runs it through the punchclock in the hallway, and he follows Lucy outside. The Ostomy factory is located on several acres of land and designed on the model of a Southern plantation due to a quirk of the Ostomy family, who privately held the company. Jake doesn't like thinking of himself as a slave, but it is clear already in his short tenure with the company that the Ostomys like to fancy themselves masters. They are particularly fond of appearing to be benevolent ones by providing employees with niceties such as the outdoor fitness walk that surrounds the factory, which, of course, also helps to lower health care insurance costs for the company by creating fitter employees and consequently lower premiums. Lucy and Jake join up with a small group of employees in front of the plantation house corporate headquarters, who are watching the current C.E.O., Cole Ostomy, plant a tree, or to be more accurate watch Cole Ostomy hold a shovel and give a speech while two first shifters plant a sapling. Cole pontificates, "We here at Ostomy Cosmetics like to help people look their best, and we feel the same way about landscapes. We like to make our environment look its best as well. Now we can't apply eyeshadow to the environment in the same way we can to a person, but we can improve the appearance of our landscape in other ways such as by planting a tree. That's why every Arbor Day we plant a tree. Now in the future, this little oak will grow big and strong and our employees can picnic under its shade, or maybe just look at it and enjoy its stately manner. We can even stand near it and breathe our carbon dioxide on it and inhale the fresh, delicious oxygen it will give out. In any case, this tree is a great addition to the Ostomy family, and I'm sure you join with me in looking forward to watching it grow over the years."

Jake, having passed scores of trees being razed to make room for unnecessary new shopping centers and housing developments on the way here, wishes the little tree luck.

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel, which is available in print and as an ebook.